FRC Build Season Workshop Resources

[ChuckDickerson]

I am curious what the “average” or “typical” workshop is for FRC teams. I know some teams build in school classrooms/workshops and others in someone’s home garage and yet others in multimillion dollar corporate machine shops. Our team has never had a permanent “home”. Every year we seem to work in a different place wherever we can beg, borrow, or steal during the build season. We haven’t had a heated workshop in years! Outside of the build season we store stuff wherever we can which for a long time was mostly my home garage but now includes a small area at one of our sponsors the size of an office or two. Every year about this time we get worried about where we can setup our build shop but somehow something always works out. We are starting to get one of our sponsors to warm up to the idea of providing us a permanent “home” to work in year after year. However, since space isn’t cheap they want to know what we really “need”.

So that brings me to my question: What does an FRC team “need” as far as workshop space and facilities and resources to maintain a competitive and sustainable team that accomplishes the goals of the FIRST FRC program?

Please post your opinions whether they are a hacksaw, hand drill, and someone’s one car garage or a full on zillion dollar CNC machine shop with enough open space to build a full practice field to competition specs. I imagine most responses will be somewhere in the middle. This thread is not meant to be a bashing of the “haves” or the “have nots”. It is meant to find out what teams do have and if they have what they “need” (not “want”) to be successful. For the purposes of this thread I am considering mentors as a separate resource. It would be impossible to place a value on the time, effort, knowledge, and experience of all the wonderful mentors in FIRST. I am more interested in physical workshop space and tooling resources, materials/supplies, computational resources, etc.